A couple of days before he turns 40, and a couple of weeks after finally retiring from club duty, Aaron Kernan is in a fertile period for reflection.
Weighing it all up, the 18 county titles he won with Crossmaglen Rangers, the club All-Irelands, the Ulster championship wins with Armagh, the young player of the year award, the National League and interprovincial honours, it is a larder crammed with precious memories.
But would he like to be starting all over again now, with the way that Gaelic football is played at the elite level? He has an indirect way of answering that one, a story from this season’s National League game between Armagh and Kerry in Tralee.
“I’d say 7,000 went down from Armagh,” he estimated. “We just talked among ourselves. There were times when you had your back to the game and you were having the craic or talking to people on the terrace, a lovely spring evening. Literally talking. You could still keep a half an eye on what was happening but you knew nothing was going to happen any time soon.”
That’s a grim picture of modern football, at the top level at least, and Kernan sees plenty of it as a pundit for GAAGO. He will be back on the beat with the broadcaster in 2024 and isn’t entirely looking forward to a lot of what he is going to be parsing and analysing. In truth, he didn’t even enjoy a lot of the recent club games he played in.
“If I’m not enjoying playing, I don’t know how you are feeling sitting watching it,” said the former wing back. “One thing that really gets me is the amount of times, and everyone play’s pretty similarly now, you can stand and take three or four touches of the ball and nobody touches him in the middle of a championship game.
“And that’s the norm now. Can you imagine back in the 1990s, the 2000s, you hadn’t time to breathe on the ball. Someone was coming straight up to harass you, to make contact with you, to turn you back and take the ball off you, regardless of where you were on the pitch because that is how they were coached by their managers.
“Isolating people one to one, that’s what creates contests, that’s what we want to see as supporters. That’s what I enjoyed as a player. I’ll be honest, I didn’t enjoy these past few years where someone would always drop back and that leaves me to play as a plus-one. I found it boring, I found it monotonous.
“I didn’t enjoy playing it, drifting from one side of the field to another, watching play. You are not really engaging. I loved to know, ‘I’m marking that man, go and get the better of him, do your own job’.”
Kernan, son of 2002 All-Ireland winning Armagh manager Joe, has a strong fear that football is going to get even duller in the coming years as coaches find new and even more efficient methods of retaining possession and minimising risk.
“I would be a wee bit worried that worse could still come,” he said. “The only reason I say that is that the last 10 years, there were a lot of people coaching who played a different, more traditional style themselves.
“Now we have people coming to coach who don’t know that different style, they don’t know how to coach forwards or half forwards to create their own space or separation like Trevor Giles used to be able to do, to win his own ball and get a ball straight into his full-forward line.
“My fear is, where are those marquee creative players? Your Jarlath Fallon, Giles, where are those centre forwards? They’re gone out of the game. Where are your marquee full backs, marquee centre backs? They’re gone.
“Growing up, I idolised individuals for doing what they were there to do. Now, everyone does the same thing.”
A potential solution for much of Gaelic football’s ills, in Kernan’s mind at least, is to insist on a set minimum number of forwards, probably three, who must be retained inside the opponent’s 45-metre line. Immediately, there will be space again to breathe, and to create, in the middle third. There should be more individual duels and 50-50 contests too.
“It would bring back a bit of what we traditionally love to see, which is individual battles which lead to contests,” said Kernan. “Which excites people. The amount of times you are sitting there now and you hear no noise at games, people are just sitting looking at their phones, just talking to each other.”
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